the haunters
by youremyqueen
Summary: Victorian Gothic AU. Love is an imperfect science and B is an imperfect scientist. (LxB)


**notes: **written for a tumblr prompt for my friend karina, totally rambling and padded with headcanon and self-indulgent emulation of the victorian gothic genre. i'm proud of some parts of it and very eh about others, but in general i hope you enjoy and thank you for reading!

* * *

There is house on a hill and in that house and on that hill there is an attic room, with one small circular window that B watches shine bright with lamplight from dusk 'til dawn every night from his perch on the village fence, sparking matches and waving them in the dark, a return beacon to whoever is locked away up there.

B imagines it's the wealthy and beautiful daughter of some duke or another, exiled from the sick city air into the green and glistening countryside in order to preserve her frail health, who whiles away her lonesome nights reading through the sinister mansion's library of great works.

He also imagines that it's a monster, like Shelley's Frankenstein, cobbled together from perfect parts to create something despicably imperfect and unfit for human society by the wizened and recalcitrant old inventor said to keep house there, little seen as he is in town. Perhaps he's too occupied seeing to his monster, making sure that it isn't set loose on the unsuspecting Winchester population.

B only wishes something so interesting would happen, but when he shares such hopes with the local children of his age, Mihael, the miller's son, makes remarks about his sanity which cannot be disregarded and B pays him back in kind by dropping his matchbook in the mill and - surely unwittingly - causing a catastrophe that leaves Mello burnt and scarred, and his father brandishing a gardening hoe at B, insisting that he leave town or face trial with the local sheriff.

B runs, laughing all the while, and maybe the accident hadn't been quite as accidental as he'd made it out to be, but it makes no difference, either way. With no family and no particular friends, he feels little regret at leaving the town behind, and resolves to make for the nearest city.

Before the bulk of his journey begins, however, he takes on a once inconceivable task, and climbs the hill, walks up the cobbled path to the house that stands there stony and forbidding, a gatekeeper between the earth and the horizon, and rings the doorbell.

The man who answers is not so wizened as he is meant to be. His eyes are bright, gleaming with quaint interest, as he examines the smoke-stained child on his porch.

"Hello," he says, "and who might you be?"

"B," B says, for lack of a more impressive title coming to mind, "they call me."

"B for what?" the old man asks.

B grins. "B for Bad." It's a lie, but it sounds much better than the truth.

The man tips his head the other way. "B for Bad, do you have any unbreakable dinner engagements?"

B had planned to dine on the spoils of a quick theft from one of the storehouses on the farm two miles down the main road, but the possibility of a warm supper and a bed to sleep in is far more appealing. "Not unbreakable," he tells the man, and follows him indoors the way the sun trails after the tops of the trees, tired and giddy.

* * *

Mr. Wammy takes him in with little reserve, even before he discovers that B, uncharacteristically for a boy of his station, knows his letters and can read as well as, if not better, than the average child of good breeding and high education.

He seems to like B, and B likes the roaring fires that calm the frost of winter into a watery stain on his boots, the fresh clothing and full meals, and the library, ever-revolving and free of dust or rot from how oft used it is. Contrarily, Mr. Ruvie, the co-owner of the mansion who is weedy in both look and manner, regards B with more suspicion and distaste than anything else.

There is another boy there, of about B's age, but he's thin and listless and barely speaks a word of English, and B's attempts to engage him with the scant amount of Dutch that he is teaching himself are received with little more than a wide-eyed look and a quivering lip.

"You frighten him," Mr. Wammy tells him, after another strained meal where B had been the most prolific speaker, discussing an interest in the decomposition of corpses and entreating Alastair once again to share his knowledge of the attic room and what is contained within. He's gotten nowhere with Wammy nor Ruvie on the subject, and his persistent knocks at the door have yielded nothing but the temporary cessation of ambient noise and movement; questioning A - as B has tauntingly dubbed him - is his last resort.

"His idiocy frightens me," B counters with a quirk of his lips, and dashes away from the table without being excused, or bothering to wipe gravy from his chin, to take up his nightly vigil on the top floor with a book and a throw and hours to spend staring, fizzed and frazzled, at the thin strip of light that shines under the attic door through every dark hour and on into morning.

He sometimes sees pale specters at the edges of his vision, or wakes to the springboards creaking next to his head, but when he rouses himself enough to make a proper investigation, there is never anything to be found.

* * *

About half a year or so after B moves in, Mr. Wammy takes a fever and dies two days later.

B doesn't cry, but he thinks about it, sits in his usual hunch at the bottom of the attic staircase and discusses with all of the ghosts inside of him the merits of death, life, and the hazy intangible nowhere-places in-between. Then the door opens and the ghosts scatter and there is a boy at the top of the stairs.

He is B's age, or maybe older, chalky white and stiff-limbed, in workman's clothes. He is nothing very impressive. He says, flatly, as if they're running into one another at the market or something similarly mundane, "I expected you to be at the funeral with the rest."

B frowns, pushing himself to his feet. "I didn't want to go. I suggested a cremation."

The boy tilts his head to the side, frail frame otherwise utterly still. "Quillsh thought that burning the dead was a ghastly practice."

B shrugs. "It saves space. Who are you?" He barely leaves room between the two sentiments.

The boy blinks. "Who do you think? Haven't you been knocking on my door for months? What is it you were expecting?" He moves slowly down the stairs, each step creaking under the seemingly weightless press of his foot, so slow, like a wedding march, like he's timing his steps. B's pulse runs ragged, his skin heating up, and he is afraid but he knows not what of.

"A monster," B says, before he can think it through. He adds, weakly, "Or a girl."

When the other boy finally reaches the bottom step, he eases himself down with precision, then turns to face B head-on, looking right into his eyes. Equally as slowly, he leans forward and presses his cold, pale lips to B's. He feels like grass after a rainstorm, fresh and dark and new.

When the boy pulls back his mouth quirks, and he says, "I can be both of those things."

* * *

L is the boy's name, Mr. Ruvie tells him.

"Might as well, now that Quillsh has passed. It was really only his wish to keep him separated from the majority of the populous. An experiment of sorts, you know how he was. L didn't seem to mind, anyhow, and it was no harm done, until you came. Messed about with the experiment, you did." He relates this information in his usual dry and droning tone.

"I suppose," B says, stirring his oatmeal but not eating it, "the experiment is over now?"

"I suppose," Mr. Ruvie agrees, tiredly.

"What does L stand for?"

When Mr. Ruvie looks at him then, he has a twinkle in his eye that is reminiscent of Mr. Wammy's, when he was onto a real strange, real brilliant sort of idea. "Now that, my boy, I couldn't tell you even if I wanted to."

B spends his hours at the foot of the attic stairs puzzling over the answer to this question: L for Lonely, L for Lost, L for Listless, but he comes up with nothing suitable or believable. He knocks on the door more often now than he ever had done before, and half the time he even gets a mumbled, "What is it?"

"You can come out now, you know. The game's over," B will call in, or something to that effect, but he's always met with quiet after that, save for once a dim murmur that sounds something like, "I like it in here."

After a few weeks, however, L seems to warm up to his newfound freedom, because on a stormy Wednesday morning B knocks on his door, as goes his routine, and this time the key turns in the lock and the handle twists and itopens.

* * *

"I think I'm going to die young," is the first thing L says to him, after several days spent sitting side by side on the worn wooden slats of the attic floor, reading quietly - though B doesn't retain much information, spending more time than not studiously examining L's face; the lines and protrusions, deep shadows and wintry whites, forming a sort of unpalatable masterpiece.

B swallows, replaying the words in his head like poetry. L's words are so spare that they become precious, even in all their disquieting strangeness.

B scoots closer to him, setting aside his book. "Let me see your hands."

L winces, ducking back against the table-leg his back is hunched beside. "I don't like people touching me."

"Just kissing, then?" B snorts, then grabs L's wrists and pulls his palms out from there, spreading the fingers and examining the faint lines on his skin. L digs his nails into B's knuckles in retaliation. "Ow! We all have to do things we don't like in life. Get over it."

L grits his teeth, face set in a snarl. He's so strange, like a wild boy, like the ones in the stories, grown up in the forests with the beasts and animals, tempered by the cruelty of nature. Except he was brought up in the attic room, all by himself, the opposite of wild. So contained he seems to have exploded inwardly, leaving his mind and organs and other important parts fitted together all wrong.

B likes that about him. B feels all wrong, too.

"I don't mind touching other people," L says, though he's wilting, drained of fight, in B's hands. "I just don't like people touching me."

B leans forward, slipping onto his knees before L. "That's a stupid distinction," he says, then hunches over to examine L's palms. "Your lifeline is short. Hmm, maybe you will die young."

"See," L says, snatching his hands out of B's grasp, "I told you." He turns to the side, laying down with his head cushioned on nothing but the hard floor, and cracking his book again.

B lies down next to him, body set parallel to his. "It's an imperfect science. I won't let you die."

"It's not a science at all." L completely ignores the latter statement. "Magic and mysticism. Mr. Wammy always said it was very foolish." He lets his book fall closed, too distracted with examining his palms, as if looking for some sign or symbol, a holy marking.

"Mr. Wammy's dead, so he can't have been too right," B says, facetiously, prodding at the wound just to see what his monster, his princess, will do.

L blinks at him once, and then dissolves into peals of abrupt laughter. He slides onto his back, body shaking, beautiful and mysterious, such a strange thing to lock away from the world, and yet how suitable. Were he to be in it, he would surely fracture it by the weight and weightlessness of his very being.

Magic may be foolish, but no more-so than love, and B, even at three and ten, believes himself a man no less than equal to such fool's errands.

* * *

A hangs himself, and B and L stand in the hallway of the top floor studying the bluish pallor of his face with an intellectual curiosity.

"Why'd he do it right here, do you think?" B asks. "He doesn't even come up here. Says it scares him. Ghosts and things in the walls." B grins quietly to himself, which is a bit morbid perhaps, but he'd spent cheerful hours before L had opened his door whiling away his time by haunting the hall's of the mansion, spooking A and the maids at turns.

If L notices his expression, he is unconcerned by it. "He wanted me to see it." He turns around, taking the stairs slowly up to his room. "Have the groundskeeper cut him down. Mr. Ruvie is too squeamish."

B wants to follow L upstairs, should go get someone, but in actuality all he does is stand there for a long while and wish vaguely that he had kept on with his Dutch studies.

* * *

L comes out of his bedroom regularly now, haunting the wide halls of the house with soundless footsteps, and he and B play games of hunting the hunter, each the prey of the other, making artless and circular paths around the grounds in an endless round of hide-and-seek.

B carves secret messages on the floor boards with his long nails, grown out in a claw shape for just such a purpose, and L taps out tonal patterns with his fingertips against the sconces and gilded fixtures. They take tea in the observatory, and baths in Mr. Wammy's ancient and vast claw-foot tub, weaving poetical secrets around one another like a bind, drawing them ever closer together, the space between them quickly disappearing.

B grows his hair out and unkempt, like L's, letting his sun-freckled skin fade over the course of several shuttered summers to the same sickly white, beautiful in its obscenity. Perhaps they will both be monsters, princesses locked away in their tower, a pair for the world to forget, trading clothes as easily as they trade indecipherable snatches of quaint and clever conversation, tucked away in the pantry with a pair of dice, or locked in the cramped and comforting attic room.

B is five and ten when Mr. Ruvie flatly informs them, after catching them locked together on a bright summer morning, limbs indistinguishable between them, that they are of an age when sharing a bed or washing together is no longer acceptable, and B will have to vacate back to his own spacious first-floor bedroom.

L doesn't object, barely speaks at all and doesn't seem to be paying much attention in general.

B overturns a tray of tea things, smashing two cups, three saucers, and irreparably staining an antique rug from the Far East that Mr. Wammy had brought back from one of his many trips. "You don't want me near him? You want him alone again?"

"B," Mr. Ruvie starts, brow pinched and glazed with a thin sheen of aggravated sweat. "I refuse to - "

B marches on heavy feet, already tall for his age, across the room to grab his guardian by the his cravat, which puffs up from in-between the buttons of his shirt like an inflamed appendage. "Just try and keep us apart, old man. I will eat your heart out. I can, you know." The spit is hot is mouth, blood burning with an animal rage, territorial and flaring up from the depths of his insides, a savage's first discovery of fire. "I'm a monster. You can't take me from him."

Mr. Ruvie quivers in his grip, but makes a good show of stolid unaffectedness. "Young man, this house was left in my care by Quillsh at his life's end, and I'm afraid I can do whatever I wish while under its roof and there's not a, pardon me, damned thing you can do about it, unless you wish to return to your childhood home in the village slums, which can quickly and most conveniently be arranged at my word."

"Or I could burn your pretty palace to the ground," B snarls, baring his teeth, tightening his grip, "and we can see who's slumming then, coffin-dodger."

Mr. Ruvie yanks out of his reach, stumbling back a bit onto the settee, looking the picture of the ruffled gentleman accosted by a brute. "I should have had Quillsh turn you out of doors the moment you arrived, just as I begged him to, you rabid little beast. You ought to begrateful - "

"Mr. Ruvie," L says, abruptly, cutting him off without raising his voice to more than a low murmur, "could you perhaps have more tea sent in? My last cup seems to no longer be serviceable and I'm really very thirsty."

B grins at the show of utter superiority, a dominance apparent in every part of his look and manner, despite his mild tones and uninterested appearance, body frail and slumped as lifeless as a corpse and without half the lively coloring of one. "Yeah," he adds, voice nasal and gloating, "more tea."

"B," L says, starkly, not looking at him, "do what he says. No pyromania, no undue violence. Your own bed can't be all that uncomfortable."

Roger doesn't seem sure whether or not to align himself with these remarks or not, so he just hangs back, righting his collar. B feels as if his bones have been taken out from underneath his skin and put back inside in the wrong places, leaving his limbs foreign and strange, like those of another person, a boy he's never met before.

"It is," B snaps, sinking down on the knotted oak floors before L's armchair, entreating him with his eyes. "Please don't. You need me. How else will you find the courage to leave your room? How else will you be anything but alone."

L turns to look at him finally, eyes dull, far away. "Why," he asks, as if honestly curious, "would I particularly want to be otherwise?"

* * *

It's not hard to sneak out of his room, scale the rotting oak that guards - and unwittingly gives entrance to - L's high, small window, and then leap with tremendous effort to knock aside the shutters and crawl, wriggling like an insect up through earth, into his bedroom.

L is waiting for him, knees tucked up to his chin, wrapped in his worn white bedclothes. "I'm surprised it took you a whole week. I expected you sooner."

B pulls himself unceremoniously, but with the forthright charm he likes to attribute to himself, off the floor, not bothering to brush the dirt from his clothes. "The branches kept falling off under my feet. I think I broke a rib."

L tilts his head to the side. "Impressive." He doesn't sound impressed.

B doesn't like his attitude, the sneering superiority - expressionless as it is - nor the expectation that B will doubtlessly follow wherever he leads. He will follow, but that's hardly the point. So, rather than waiting on his coy and artful signals, his stops and starts, touch here but not there, B marches straight across the creaking floorboards, grabs him with his clammy dew-wet hands, and kisses him, mouth to mouth, man to man, a perfect scoundrel.

They tip back, the strands of L's hair brushing the featherbed, B's hands grabbing him up with a heady insistence, adoration and blame and a lot of cloaked longing finally turned outward. L is the most steady thing that has ever existed in his line of sight, even with all his bobs and weaves of disinterest and removal, and B cannot let go of him.

L is still and pretty under him, pinned like some exotic beast, but unreactive, as if he hasn't even noticed. He says, slowly and solemnly, when B's lips fade breathily away from his, "Don't touch me."

B sits up, knees hiked around L's hips, the grief of rejection thin and sharp in his breast. He smiles his most daunting and daring grin. "I suppose you're going to stop me?"

L does. He sits, knocking B backwards off the bed, lightly, as if sweeping away a bit of dust, and watches him sprawl, with all his long limbs and his desperation, down on the floor. B grunts with the impact, but he's getting what he'd asked for. He tips his head back expectantly, as L slowly lowers himself down beside him, hands spreading across B's skin, light touches and glancing blows, dissatisfying to the extreme and yet impossible to refuse.

B writhes under it, tormented and devoted, isn't supposed to touch back, but does and can't stop. L knocks his hands away, keeps blocking and demurring, and B lives and breathes for the denial, is sick with his wanting for it.

"Stop me," he says, over and over, "stop me, stop me. Don't let me get away with it."

L climbs on top of him, kissing him harshly, as he always does of his own volition, sinking into B and trickling like some violent serum down his throat and into the bloodstream. Poison, poison, poison, from the monster and for the monster. They can't be apart because there's nothing else in the world for either of them. L is his lamplight in the window, illuminating the empty dirty landscape of his existence, giving his thoughts worth, his emotions shape.

"Don't let me get away."

* * *

They manage a half dozen rendezvous of this sort before Mr. Ruvie gets wise, clued in by the notable lack of rage, frustration, and threatening insinuations from B, and he walks calmly in one Sunday morning and pulls B, half asleep and mostly nude, from L's side by his bony elbow, and back to his own room in one of the lower wings, where his things wait neatly packed in the brown leather suitcase that Mr. Wammy had bought for him for their trip to Surrey.

"I gave you plenty of warning," Mr. Ruvie says.

B is usually disposed to vow terror and ruination upon the house and hearth in situations like this, flicking his matchbook menacingly, but instead he goes for what he knows will pierce deepest - and perhaps make his eviction wholly indefinite - and snarls, "I gave him plenty of something else." He wriggles his brows insinuatingly, a thief in a gentleman's house, and braces for the ensuing blow.

It doesn't come. Mr. Ruvie only sighs, shaking his head. "You can take anything you were given during your stay. You're nearly a man grown, you'd be leaving home soon anyway." He stops in the doorframe when he turns to go, back straight and stately, but weighed down by age. "I'm not doing this for his sake," he says very quietly.

"Then whose?" B asks, voice just as small. A flicker of noise, blown in with the wind.

Mr. Ruvie doesn't look back at him. "You're too young to understand. When you're my age and you've seen what I have seen, you'll realize that the world needs lonely men to do its lonely jobs, for the good of the rest."

He leaves the door open when he goes: an invitation out.

Alone in his room with his luggage and his diabolical heart, B flicks his matchbook; he vows terror and ruination.

* * *

There is a house on a hill and in that house and on that hill there is an attic room, and it is the last to burn. The old oak that wavers beside it catches a spark in the roaring wind of flame and lights up, bright and angry and hungry, as B struggles his way up it and to the window ledge, where he hangs by the tips of his fingers and yells, "Come out before the dragon takes you, princess!" in a vicious, tender voice.

L, ostensibly unconcerned with the way that his bedroom and all of the furnishings contained therein are burning away to nothing, takes his hand as if B is a footman pulling him into a coach. They slip, tumbling against the mess of branches, bodies scraping the bark and wrapping one another up, until they hit the cool grass.

B breaks L's fall, and L rests his head on his chest. "I'm supposed to die young," he says softly, with something that isn't quite wonder and isn't quite gratitude, but could pass for both.

"It's an imperfect science," B says, and strokes his hair.

* * *

**fin.**


End file.
